IBM's latest mainframe plagued by problems

IBM has admitted that insufficient testing and corner cutting were to blame for the problems many users have experienced with its newest mainframe product, the Multiprise 3000.

More than one in seven Multiprise 3000 users have had unexpected outages because of problems with internal management software. This highly embarrassing problem for IBM, which it hasn't yet solved, has struck at the heart of the mainframe's strongest characteristic - its reliability.

The Multiprise 3000 was announced last September to target the low end of the S/390 market, where medium size companies, or large enterprises with a single legacy application, were turning to Unix as a cheaper alternative.

Around 15 per cent of Multiprise 3000 mainframes had at least one "unexpected outage" in the field and 30 per cent have so far needed repair action, IBM representatives said. They admitted that insufficient testing had been done on certain configurations.

"The unique selling proposition of the S/390 is its five nines reliability. MVS has a reputation second to none - it always maintains at least 99.95 per cent reliability. If you take that away, you wind up with what is relatively an expensive product," said Phil Paine, independent analyst.

"The situation is not good," admitted Dave Messina, S/390 program director. "We are certainly working on it. We set ourselves very high quality objectives of 20 years mean time between failure and are confident that we will achieve that design objective."

IBM has shipped around 200 of the Multiprise 3000 models since September. Messina said no customers had suffered any data integrity damage from any of the outages.

The problem lies in the microcode that the S/390 uses to control and manage its internal systems. One batch of software patches was sent out in January, but these failed to fix the faults. IBM is now working on new patches that it had hoped would be sent out this week, but it now has no date for when these will be ready, Messina admitted.

"We are aware of the problems and we are taking extraordinary action to get out of this situation," Brenda Zawatski, S/390 marketing director told annoyed channel partners at IBM Partnerworld two weeks ago. She added, "A lot of customers will have experienced no problems at all, so we are looking at certain configurations only."

Zawatski said that in development of the Multiprise 3000 product IBM had "made changes to be cost competitive", which resulted in the reliability problems.

"They definitely cut corners on this product. It would not have been viable anyway if they had not," said Paine.

IBM also admitted this was the second major problem with the Multiprise 3000. Big Blue was forced to stop production of the product for two weeks in October and November of last year while it replaced power supply systems on a number of Multiprise 3000s, including some already shipped to customer sites.